The VALUE of nature

The money markets are in crisis, and our world leaders are running around
like headless chickens trying to fix the problem – there is distrust
between financial institutions because they have all been tainted by greed
and easy gain – they have forgotten how to do an honest deal and so for
their own safety they are not doing any deals at all. Pouring money at
this problem may work - but, has money ever bought trust?

And what is money anyway? Where do all the billions that are wiped off the
stock market end up; a black hole? Is money real?

Well OK I did not do well in economics BUT I can’t help but wonder at the
way the world puts a value on things and how overnight the ‘value’ can be
wiped away by the ebb and flow of an invisible tide of money. Well, the
tide has turned and money levels are low. Now here’s an interesting
thought, in reality the numbers on the money traders computer screens
reflect nothing more than ‘confidence’ and we are all in a spin because of
how sure or confident traders are of a safe bet – how they feel about
their ability to second guess the potential value of shares. In the
constant pursuit of easy gain, the markets are massaged by rumour and
speculation so are these manipulated values ever real? My head hurts at
this point.

A tree is real. It will grow and provide more value than the space it
stands in. You can believe in a tree.

Our forests work hard at the ‘essential’ task of carbon management and
cleaning our ‘vital’ water and they do this for free with a multitude of
value added services gifted to other life forms that live with them. But
do we value them for what they do? If we did, our headlines would read
slightly differently.

In the news on Friday – tucked away and not in the headlines I read…The
global economy is losing more money from the disappearance of forests than
through the current banking crisis, according to an EU-commissioned study.
It puts the annual cost of forest loss at between $2 trillion and $5
trillion.

The EU study is an attempt to indicate that the loss and decline in nature
represents REAL lost value that overshadows the crisis in the financial
system. So how did this value get calculated… Well when FREE essential and
vital service providers are taken away, we have to find other ways of
getting those services – we have to create/build replacements in order to
survive and in doing this a monetary value will develop.

Speaking to BBC News on the fringes of the congress, study leader Pavan
Sukhdev emphasised that the cost of natural decline dwarfs losses on the
financial markets.

"It's not only greater but it's also continuous, it's been happening every
year, year after year," he told BBC News.
"So whereas Wall Street by various calculations has to date lost, within
the financial sector, $1-$1.5 trillion, the reality is that at today's
rate we are losing natural capital at least between $2-$5 trillion every
year."

Forest losses are real – it is not a rumour. Nature is precious, life
giving and free. Surely, to those who depend on nature to survive (that’s
all of us folks), the value is obvious and so great it would be
immeasurable – BUT if putting a monetary value on it shakes politicians
awake and into action, brilliant. If this value creates trust among world
leaders to work together in conserving our natural world, we are saved!

Lastly, some food for thought what if we traded in trees as carbon
management systems… confidence in value would be high, forests would be
protected and farmed, our respect for nature would return, environmental
science would boom, our ability to design with new materials would be
challenged, we would seek to learn more about the world that sustains us
(we may even get smarter!!) and... money would be worth the paper it’s
printed on.